I’ve waffled a bit on the control panel art, trying to decide if it was a little “much”. After all, one of my design goals was to be relatively conservative. That’s why I’m going to be staining the cabinet to match the rest of the furniture I have in that room, and keeping it largely toned down.

I wanted to get a rough sense of what the art would look like on the cabinet, so I fired up Gimp and did some cutting and pasting and perspective skewing. Through the magic of layers and editing, I got a reasonable result, I think.

Just a quick post — I got a photo today of the cabinet parts. Its just one quick photo, but it appears to be some of the MDF pieces. The top, and control panels are MDF, the rest are Baltic Birch plywood.

The first shot of some of the freshly CNC cut parts of the cabinet. These appear to be the MDF parts.

I got word today that the CNC cutting of the cabinet was finished yesterday and the parts were picked up today. There’s still some work that Haruman has to do this weekend, but the word is that I ought to have it on its way here next week!

In the mean time I’ve been, while doing things like working on the Cupcade, getting the rest of the bits and pieces here. In the last week, the T-molding for the top of the table arrived, as did the 1/4″ glass for the top.

I also spent a good bit of time over the weekend working on designs for the control panel overlays. These are the graphics that get printed onto the control panel surface, both to indicate button use and to jazz them up.

It took a lot longer than I expected for the paint to dry on the panels, so I couldn’t finish putting together the mini arcade machine yesterday. The paint is still, more than 24 hours later, “tacky”, but it was dry enough. I’m sure it’ll harden up over the next few days.

Last night the bits and pieces showed up from Adafruit for the Cupcade, so I sat down and started assembling it. Its not particularly complicated to put together and its VERY well documented on their website, but there’s a lot of fiddly soldering, made trickier by my not being able to find my low-power iron and having to use a way-too-beefy 40 watt one.

Its taking some time to get the final CNC details back from Haruman’s Customs, which has left the arcade cabinet project in a bit of limbo. On a bit of a whim, I decided to order a Adafruit Cupcade micro-arcade-cabinet. Think full-blown arcade cabinet running MAME on Raspberry Pi, with a joystick, buttons and a 2.8″ screen!

Although not even remotely as complicated to set up as the big cocktail cabinet, there looks to be quite a bit of work involved in building it. I’m also going to do it up with paint and custom artwork. I’ve been fiddling with some, which I show down below, but I think my super-talented friend Jacob is going to whip something up even more totally-awesome (and less cut-n-paste) for me!

I got a few more updated renderings last night of the control panels for the arcade cabinet. A few more details are in them that weren’t in the prior ones. These now have the CNC layout for the additional “Add Credit” buttons, the pinball buttons, and the holes for the USB ports.

After a couple weeks of back-and-forth on the overall parameters of the design for the cabinet, Haruman got me a couple first-pass renderings of the cabinet. Colors and stuff don’t match what I’m intending to do, but the overall size and layout is exactly what I was hoping for!

Almost all of the buttons on the arcade cabinet will be illuminated, to show which are used in a given game and to differentiate them. There are 33 RGB illuminated UltraLUX chrome buttons, and four red ones for “credits”. The switches and everything showed up the other day, so I went ahead and played around with the hardware.